How To Receive Push Notifications From iPhone And iPad On Your Mac Or Windows PC

For those among us who are Mac OS X users, you will no doubt be familiar with the Growl notification service. Growl is described as the ultimate notification service for OS X and is by far one of the easiest methods available for keeping in touch with installed applications, and any messages or alerts that they may give. Different users appreciate the simplicity of Growl for a number of reasons, with one of the main ones being that it works right out of the box and doesn’t have any complicated setup procedures. Applications that are Growl compatible will simply just work with the system without any fuss.

With that being said, Growl does offer support for a number of more advanced options for users who wish to get a little bit more technical when it comes to their notifications. This additional support includes an option to theme notifications as well as setting the Growl app to listen out for notifications produced by other machines or devices, or the flip side of that and actually forward Mac or Windows notifications to other devices. iOS developer Jesus A. Alvarez has taken advantage of that inclusion by making a Cydia based tweak for jailbroken iOS devices called GrowlNotifier.

GrowlNotifier is a relatively simple offering in terms of user interaction and initial setup. The core functionality of the extension is to simply intercept all incoming notifications on the iOS device in question and forward them to a Mac or Windows machine that is running Growl. This is achieved through a simple setup process which involves specifying the computer’s IP or MAC address through the Settings application on the iOS device. The Growl application on the desktop then needs a simple check button to be selected through the Network settings panel to ensure that it is constantly listening out for other devices.

When a push or local notification is received on the device running GrowlNotifier, it is then pushed seamlessly to the Mac and displayed as if it was a standard Growl notification. This system also respects the Growl setup rules on the desktop machine, meaning that if any theme or aesthetic enhancement has been selected, the intercepted notification will be displayed in the same manner. In a world where mobile devices are playing an increasingly important role in our lives, GrowlNotifier will make sure that no important notifications are missed while you have your head buried in your work.

GrowlNotifier is available as a free of charge download from the BigBoss repository and requires a device running iOS 5 or above.

Of course, you will need to jailbreak your device to install this tweak. For jailbreaking the latest iOS 5.1 (tethered), follow the instructions posted here to jailbreak using Redsn0w, or here for Sn0wbreeze. For jailbreaking iPhone 4S and iPad 2, you can simply follow our step by step tutorialposted here to jailbreak iOS 5.0.1 using Absinthe on Windows or Mac. Those of you with an iPhone 4, 3GS, iPad 1, and iPod touches can use Redsn0w or Sn0wbreeze to untether jailbreak on iOS 5.0.1.